Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  Sonnabend stated that he had attempted to question Logan regarding the murder but was refused the permission by his superior officers. He had made an attempt at the Penitentiary and was told after going over there that he would have to have at least advance notice and special permission to interrogate Logan. This he never got.

  Had a good long visit with Mr. Sonnabend and he expressed very much his desire to cooperate and help solve this crime. He still thinks that Sgt. Mangrin who he believes is tending bar some where around Hungry Horse, Montana, has complete knowledge of the identity of the Murderer.

  What impressed Bamonte was the tenacity of Charley Sonnabend. At least somebody was outraged that a cop killer had escaped justice. He pictured the 270-pound carpenter propped up in bed, one day before going into the hospital for an operation that could likely end his life, trying to pass on the key to solving an old murder—a living will of sorts. He had carried the story around with him for more than two decades, but what had come of it since? Who had carried it for the last thirty-two years? In Bamonte’s mind, the last official words from Sonnabend raised more questions than they answered:

  • The gun. Earlier, Sonnabend had said one of the pistols taken from Logan had been signed out by Detective Roston. Now Sonnabend was saying that he had taken possession of a gun and later gave it to his nephew. Was this the murder weapon? Was Sonnabend himself covering for Roston by holding on to the pistol that may have been used to shoot Conniff?

  • The roadblock. Could there be a police report, or better yet, one of the original officers, somewhere, with details of what happened the night of the roadblock? If Roston had indeed been stopped at the North Division Street roadblock, with an overheated car and a passenger next to him, one hour after the shooting—the time it would take to drive from Newport to Spokane—that could be a damning piece of evidence against the detective.

  • The follow-up interview. Why was Sonnabend prevented from interviewing Logan at the McNeil Island Penitentiary? Logan had already confessed Roston’s role, or so Sonnabend said; but Sonnabend apparently needed something more. To Bamonte, it made no sense that the Spokane Police Department would deny permission for one of its veteran detectives to pursue a killing. But this raised the larger question of what had come of Sonnabend’s case. If Logan had indeed told the whole story of the butter racket and the shooting, why hadn’t Roston been arrested? And what had happened between Sonnabend’s initial summoning, in 1955, and this second one, in 1957? Did the new investigation die with Elmer Black? Down went Black and up went the old Blue Wall.

  Bamonte shivered from the cold. He wiped away a thin layer of frost inside his window and looked outside. The streets were dead. He opened the refrigerator and stared; he had not eaten anything since lunch, but he wasn’t hungry.

  He hated being alone. His worst fears grew quickly, all out of proportion, without the leveling effect of a trusted companion. What if Betty left him? The thought took him back to the Christmas when his mother and father were hauled off to jail.

  He stretched out on the couch and fell asleep. When he awoke, sometime in the predawn, he felt chilled. He walked to the sink and washed his face.

  “Betty …?”

  No answer. He looked in the bedroom, not expecting to find anything. The clock blinked—and Betty was asleep.

  Bamonte was drawn back into the study, lured by another stack of forgotten police reports and by the voices waiting to tell their stories. Just a quick peek. Within minutes, he was out of the family doubts and back in the winter of late 1957. The temperatures were plunging to thirty-five below zero around Newport. When the Conniff case was presented to Sheriff Giles by Sonnabend, he had worked only a single homicide: a drunken seventeen-year-old, attempting to start a fire under his car as a way to heat the vehicle up, got into an argument with his uncle and pulled a knife on the older man. The uncle shot him; a jury later ruled it was justifiable homicide.

  With Sonnabend’s narrative, Giles had a more difficult task. From what Bamonte could tell from the records, Giles, who had jurisdiction over the Conniff killing, decided not to reopen the case unless he could find some compelling piece of physical evidence to back what Sonnabend had said. The deposit of clues from the dying Spokane cop apparently was not enough.

  “What more do you want?!” Bamonte said, slapping the papers with the back of his hand.

  Also in the stack, Bamonte found two letters. One was from Giles, the other from the FBI. The first note, dated a day after the 1957 Sonnabend meeting, was a request to J. Edgar Hoover that the FBI director examine the .32 pistol which Sonnabend had retrieved from Logan and given to his nephew. He also sent along a packet of spent bullets—slugs taken from the groin, armpit, and rib cage of Marshal Conniff. A few weeks later, one of Hoover’s assistants returned the bullets and pistol with a short note:

  “None of these .32 bullets could have been fired from the gun submitted.”

  12.

  A Family Visit

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, in the basement classroom in Colville, Bamonte told the other students what he had found. The class met once a week in the pine country east of the Columbia River. The sheriff was always dragging stories in from the Pend Oreille and trying to wedge them into the discussion. When the study group was first assembled, nearly two years earlier, some of the students expected ignorance and hayseed homilies from Bamonte. And at times he even played along, doing his cowboy-sheriff role to live up to the stereotype. Once when the class was gathered for a dinner party at Professor Carey’s house, Bamonte arrived late, on his motorcycle, dusted and breathless.

  “Where you been, Tony?” Carey asked him.

  “A murder. How’s the food?”

  “What kind of murder?”

  “Guy hacked up another guy after he caught him screwing his wife.”

  And of course that ended all discussion, for the time being, of grade points and career goals.

  But Bamonte was a serious student, incapable of looking out at the flat surface of the Columbia River near Colville, backed up by dams, without thinking of the Indian tribes that used to gather at long-buried waterfalls to trade salmon with Hudson’s Bay Company scouts. On this Saturday, as he discussed his research project, he sounded like a scientist who has just emerged from years in the lab with a breathless discovery.

  “I can’t believe they sat on this!” he said. “It’s a damn shame!”

  After he told the class about Detective Sonnabend’s revelations, there were dozens of questions:

  What happened to Sonnabend?

  He died, free of the story he had carried for the last third of his life, but frustrated because nobody had ever been brought to trial for the killing of George Conniff.

  Didn’t the sheriff’s office at the time try to do anything?

  Yes, they sent a gun to the FBI in 1957. But after it was returned the case went dormant again.

  What about Detective Roston and this Sergeant Mangrin mentioned by Sonnabend—were they ever found, or questioned?

  As near as anyone could tell, both men were dead, their secrets buried with them. The files indicated that Sheriff Giles, in the mid-1950s, could find no trace of either man.

  So they got away with it?

  Bamonte held his response for a minute.

  “That appears to be the case.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Professor Carey was chatting with Carol Bonino, editor of Signum, the quarterly publication of Gonzaga University. Looking for stories, she asked Carey if he had any interesting students or anecdotes to share.

  The teacher thought of Bamonte. “There’s this one middle-aged guy in the MOL class in Colville,” Carey said. “A sheriff.…”

  On page two of the spring 1989 edition of Signum, a small story appeared, under the headline SHERIFF BAMONTE BRINGS RUGGED WEST ALIVE WITH MOL THESIS. The piece told about Bamonte’s thesis—filled with “short biographies on previous Pend Oreille County sheriffs, but also macabre, tragic, and sometimes heroic true stories about
enforcing the law in this corner of Washington.”

  The Conniff case was mentioned only in passing, somewhat inaccurately, and not by name, as “a story that goes back to 1935, when a marshal in Newport was shot and killed, with no suspects. Two policemen from a nearby community were implicated in the shooting when, in a deathbed confession, an acquaintance of one policeman revealed his friend’s involvement in the incident.”

  The story ended with a quote from Bamonte, his answer to a question about why he was doing the project. “I wanted to leave something behind,” the sheriff said.

  Carol Bonino told her husband, Rick, a reporter and columnist at the Spokesman-Review, that Bamonte might make a good story. The tip was passed on, and eventually the story was assigned to a feature writer, Jim Camden. He was fascinated by the sheriff-scholar from the wilderness county. The paper’s morgue had plenty of clips on how Bamonte was always getting in trouble with the local powers, or digging up an obscure fact to counter what everybody had already concluded, or nipping at the boot heels of some federal bureaucracy. But meeting him was another thing entirely. He was lean, edgy, with a whispery voice, talking about history and theory with a .38 strapped to his chest, unsure of himself or his intellect, sometimes killing his words in mid-sentence, jumping in and out of his seat, offering coffee or interrupting to show a picture of Bull Bamonte or taking a call from an enraged citizen. He never put anything on hold, and so his days were chaotic and overcrowded. Around the office, some of the clerical staff thought the master’s degree would help the sheriff sharpen his organizational skills. But here he was going off in three new directions.

  Spokane’s morning paper, which circulated all over eastern Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, and southern British Columbia, ran a story about Bamonte’s master’s thesis on page one of the February 11, 1989 edition, under the headline SHERIFF WROTE THE BOOK ON CRIME IN HIS COUNTY. Like Bonino’s piece, the story told of the hyperactive cop and his unusual master’s thesis. “I love to write,” the sheriff was quoted as saying. “This gave me a chance to get some professional help.” The article recounted each of the major chapters in the developing thesis, the sheriffs and the crimes of their time. Midway into the piece, the reporter mentioned, in a single paragraph, the killing of the Newport marshal, although he reported incorrectly that he’d been gunned down in the late 1920s, and that two police officers might have been involved.

  “The murderers were never caught,” the story said, “but years later, the deathbed confession of a Spokane policeman revealed that he and a fellow officer were partners in a robbery scheme that led to the murder.”

  GEORGE EDWIN CONNIFF, JR., was stoking the wood stove inside his home in north Spokane when his wife summoned him to the breakfast table and pointed at the front page of the newspaper. “Take a look at this,” Jane Conniff told her husband.

  He closed the door to the stove and walked to the table. Tall, smooth-faced, and skinny at age seventy-three, the only son of the slain Newport marshal had gone nearly fifty-four years without the slightest hint of who had put four bullets into his father in 1935. When the shooting happened, he was twenty years old and had just returned to the Pend Oreille. Father and son had worked throughout the hot summer of 1935, laboring under smoky skies to build a new cabin to replace the home destroyed by fire. They had become close in a way that had never before been possible. For the next half-century George Jr. worked in sawmills and fruit orchards, fought against the Japanese on a destroyer in the Philippines, fished on commercial boats, and eventually settled on a career as an electrician.

  “Is that your father they’re talking about here?” Jane Conniff asked her husband.

  George took his glasses off and sat down. He read and reread the single paragraph about the marshal, then looked out the window at the frozen ground.

  “I’ll … be … damned.”

  The date given in the paper was wrong, but the circumstances seemed right. No other Newport marshal had been gunned down by robbers. What stunned George junior was the line about a deathbed confession implicating a Spokane policeman; he had never heard such a thing.

  He called Bamonte. The sheriff was startled to hear a voice to go with a family name.

  “George … Conniff—”

  “Junior. I’m his son.”

  “My God!”

  Bamonte invited George and his family to come to his office and take a look at what he’d found. No longer would it be just Tony Bamonte talking to himself and the yellowed police reports in the middle of the night.

  THE PEND OREILLE was under heavy snow when George and his two sisters, Mary and Olive, drove up to see the sheriff in early March. Even in late winter, when most landscapes looked ragged and tired, the Pend Oreille held its beauty: the larch, pine, and fir forests marching up the Selkirks, trickles of clear water pushing through stream channels frozen at the edges. George was the baby of the family; Mary Pearce was seventy-five and Olive Pearce was seventy-seven. Driving north along the Newport Highway, they were children again, a family growing up on a sixty-acre stump ranch in a meadow with views of Hoodoo Mountain. George remembered the Kalispel tribal elder who’d invited him in to see his tepee and feel the bearskin floor. The boy caught fish with his hands and swung from rope swings in the trees and dove into river pools. He thought of what 1935 was like in the Pend Oreille, cutting firewood for a dollar a day, and then eating that dollar at night to restock the calories burned up with the axe.

  Olive saw the exhausted face of her father, who never seemed to rest, working by day to build the cabin, dragging himself through the night shift to protect the merchants of Newport. The fire that burned their home on the stump ranch had come at the worst time; for a while, they thought they might join those other Americans who took to the road in boxcars. This road, paved and fast, had been its own trail of tears, a route for dust-bowl refugees and forest fire mercenaries and platoons of Civilian Conservation Corps workers. The drifters emptied into the Pend Oreille near Sandpoint, thirty miles east of Newport, where three railroad lines converged. Many of them ended up in the transient camp along the Pend Oreille River. In the absence of leads, all three children suspected that a drifter had killed their father, somebody whose empty stomach drove him to kill.

  As the Conniffs entered Newport, and took the left-hand turn off the highway toward the sheriff’s office, George remembered his father’s dying hours. After spending the night in agony on an operating table in Newport, he was transferred to the ambulance that would carry the bleeding marshal to a hospital in Spokane. As he was lowered into the car, the marshal winced and spoke his last words:

  “Make it snappy, boys.”

  BAMONTE GREETED the Conniff family like lost relatives. Their grief was still evident, but they were gratified to have a partner after fifty-four years of unanswered questions.

  The sheriff started talking nonstop, bringing up Sonnabend and Elmer Black, pawned pants and police cover-ups. “There’s so much to tell you,” he said. He went off on another verbal gallop, then pulled the reins back. “On second thought, I’ll let you see for yourself. Some of this stuff you won’t believe.”

  He brought out a large box holding the old typewritten police reports, a few pictures, letters to and from the FBI, and two summaries of the 1955 and 1957 interviews with Sonnabend. The sheriff left them alone for a while, in the room with the written words.

  Olive, broad-shouldered, stern-faced, bespectacled, became very angry, near tears at one point. “Why?” She lashed out. “Why didn’t they tell us any of this?”

  She had worked in the Pend Oreille sheriff’s office in the 1940s and the early 1950s and knew every deputy from her father’s time. One of the county’s lawmen, Sheriff Holmes, was a neighbor of the Conniffs at the very time he had heard Sonnabend’s deathbed story; yet he never said a word about the new information to any member of the victim’s family. What was there to protect? Had any of the Conniffs been told of the evidence linking a Spokane detective to th
e killing, they would have hounded the police for some resolution, Olive said. Alma, the marshal’s widow, died in late 1955, several months after Sonnabend summoned the authorities to his bedside. Though she had been assured that things had been thoroughly investigated until all leads were exhausted, Alma Conniff went to her grave frustrated by the great mystery of her husband’s murder.

  When Bamonte returned to the room, he found George and Mary subdued. But Olive was red with outrage. “How could they keep this from us?” she asked.

  Bamonte was gentle, the velvet-voiced cop accustomed to explaining random accidents that take children from mothers and spouses from lovers. He could have been explaining why a deer sometimes shatters the front window of a pickup truck, for he was no longer surprised by his conclusion.

  “You wonder why nobody told you about any of this? So did I. It’s a big question without an obvious answer. I’ll tell you what I think: the people who were supposed to protect the public seem to have been the very ones responsible for the murder—”

  “Dad was killed by a Spokane policeman,” Olive interrupted.

  “But they’re dead, aren’t they?” George asked. “Everyone who had something to do with it is gone. So why would they continue to cover up?”

  “You don’t understand. These are cops. They’re sworn to uphold the law, but a cop’s first loyalty is to his own kind.”

  “So is this it?” Olive asked. “Can’t you do anything more?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  The Conniffs looked at each other, a silent survey.

  “We do,” Olive said.

  “You’re damn right we do,” George said. “We want to know what really happened.”

  “I can’t promise you anything,” Bamonte said. “But if you give me some time, I’ll go after this. I’ll open it up. I’m the sheriff here. This murder happened in my county. I don’t see why we can’t kick over a few rocks.”

  The Conniffs were encouraged, but only moderately so. It was not the first time a Pend Oreille County sheriff had made such a statement.